


the creed of the seamstress

by isozyme



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Body Horror, F/F, Power Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-26
Updated: 2012-12-26
Packaged: 2017-11-22 11:55:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/609554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isozyme/pseuds/isozyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>This is the better option: Rose can eat sugar, and drink water.  It will be a very slow starvation.</i>
  <br/>
  <i>This is the worse option: the renal arrest will kill her, and the Condesce will bring her back.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Rose Lalonde, Seer of the Fleet, serves at the pleasure of the Empress.  Terezi Pyrope is something else altogether.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the creed of the seamstress

**Author's Note:**

  * For [byzantienne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/byzantienne/gifts).



and it's a strange breed  
a different kind of creature  
that looks for love through the eye of a needle  
but the creed of the seamstress is  
that you're pretty in pieces  
-Dessa, "Seamstress"

 

* * *

 

The seadwellers at the state dinner are all wearing the narrow-toothed grin of eels waiting for a hapless meal. Rose Lalonde is not hapless; she is dressed carefully for war and diplomacy, skinned out of her usual jumpsuit and poured into a scarlet gown. There are small tanks carrying three and a half hours worth of compatible air hidden cleverly in the folds of her skirt.

The tubes that run across her face and fit into her nostrils are gilded with yellow gold that matches her hair. They are not as comfortable or as safe as her mask, but they are more photogenic. If she takes a breath through her mouth to speak, it will burn all the way down.

Rose does not breathe through her mouth. She has been doing this for a long time, almost as long as the violet blooded fleet admiral across from her.

He passes her a goblet of sweet Alternian wine, and she accepts it graciously. Troll tissues are affected by ethanol in similar ways to human ones, which means that Rose is free to get drunk with her employers. The conversation around her transitions seamlessly to a small scandal in the engineering unit: a maroon blooded troll killed her moirail by heavy metal poisoning over a series of perigees, skimming platinum and gold from the computer chip manufacturing line. Her moirail had been the calignious plaything of one of the commanders at the dinner, a possible motive. The commander fiddles with his cufflinks and traces worriedly over the embroidered hatch-sign on his lapel. He will be sent on the next generation ship into the abyss, a pioneer for progress and colonialism. He will die there.

The maroonblood's moirail had also been posthumously proven to have small ties to the rising rebellion brewing in the nearest solar system, another motive.

Rose can feel the subtle lash of criticism directed at her as well, laced delicately through the idle gossip. Rose Lalonde, outdone by the legislacerator corps. Rose Lalonde, unable to weed out even the smallest, weakest part of the brewing insurgence. "Helmseer Lalonde," the fleet admiral says, giving up on waiting for her to volunteer some weakness, "you must be very tightly scheduled of late. This is the first social gathering you've graced with your presence in quite some time."

"Yes," she replies. "Very much so." Rose is struck by the sudden thought that she might have slept with him, fifty sweeps ago when she was trying black romance on for size. There are small scars on his earfins that look the right shape to have been made by human teeth.

"Is the event to your liking?"

Rose feels a headache coming on, thrashing against her skull every time she turns to nod politely at a server. She is counting down the minutes left in her oxygen supply; it will run out in half an hour. "Perfectly so," she says.

The empress uses her body to keep her on a leash. Rose can climb a ladder, and her teeth are sound in her head, and she can twist her mouth into strange Alternian vowels, but she cannot breathe their air, and she cannot ingest their food.

It is the component parts, the Empress's scientists had told her. Down at a fundamental level you are different; we must make your food and air in a lab. At very great expense, they do not say. Your running costs are greater than the third and fourth imperial hiveships combined, they also do not say. When Rose is presented with a plate of meat at the banquet it looks very like the meat on the plates beside hers. This is a fancy trick they have learned in recent sweeps, that they can grow a steak out of her mesenchymal cells given the right nutrient broth and enough time. It is much more polite, partaking in this small cannibalism, so that she can be fed without a tube at state functions.

(They are very proud of the delicate traceries of fat and the realistic bones. Alternians crunch through the bones when they eat. Rose's jaws have grown strong.)

Rose is forced to leave before dessert. They’d lingered over the main course, and she feels light headed and sick. She excuses herself to the murmur of condolences. The door, when she slips out, beeps, hisses, and shuts with an accusatory clang.

Rose makes her way down a hallway and through the rush of trolls leaving an auditorium, all hurrying to be moving on with their lives after a two hour briefing. They part around her gracelessly, like poorly helmed reconnaissance ships around a rogue asteroid, equal portions curious and terrified. Rose hides a sneer and tries not to wobble.

Except for one, dressed in eye-searing teal and scarlet in the rigid, poorly tailored cut of a new neophyte, who stops a few yards before her, elbowing a coworker sharply in the side when he comes too close. She casually adjusts bright red lenses while she stares, and sniffs once, sharply. It makes all of Rose's implants itch. "Helmseer," says the legislacerator recruit. "They said you were a myth!"

"Charmed, I'm certain," Rose says. "You are?"

"The best lawyer in the fleet," she replies, and melts back into the crowd.

The atmosphere pump hooked into Rose's sleeve starts the hysterical beeping of medical equipment in distress, which means her time is up. She is very clever, and it is not hard to see how to tear apart alien empires, but genius has many limitations, and the need to keep breathing is, regrettably, one of them.

When she returns to her chambers she sends a polite note to the fleet admiral's secretary, and is rewarded with the name Terezi Pyrope, an annotated version of her schedule, and an invitation to a private tactics meeting.

 

*

The rebel forces reject every single fucking piece of the peace treaty (the peace ultimatum), which is too bad because it means Rose has to spend seven hours straight hooked to a computer, sorting useless guilty rebels from the guilty rebels with state secrets. She could be arranging battle fleets across two galaxies or reciting the planets that would fall into famine and drought in the next sweep, but instead she is acting as a binary switch; interrogate, kill, kill, interrogate, kill.

In the video footage, some of them cry, and some of them shout and throw things, and some of them stare glassy-eyed at the wall.

It's interesting that their responses to interrogation is not particularly helpful for predicting how useful they'll be alive. It correlates somewhat better to how many of loved ones have died so far at the hands of the empire, but that's not applicable information, so Rose neglects to share.

Afterwards, Rose doesn't make it back to her chambers. She locks all the muscles in her back ramrod stiff to hold her head high until she round the corner into the public restroom, then allows herself to slump and throw her hand against a wall for support the rest of the way to the stall. She falls to her knees on the tile, not coordinated enough to lock the door behind her. It takes a great deal of focus to coordinate breathing in, stripping off her respirator to retch into the toilet, and settling the respirator back on again. In between waves of nausea, she rests her forehead on the cool chitin of the waste receptacle and catalogues her ills. The ache in her joints is old, and the sharp taste of metal in the back of her throat is familiar. The blood in her spit is new. The vomiting might be either.

This is much worse than usual.

Much worse than usual means there is something wrong with her food. Rose snatches at the future, and is graced with an obvious choice between slow poisoning by antimetabolites and slow starvation. The solution is unpleasant; between retches she pulls out her IV shunts, first the ones in her arms, then the harder to reach ones on her back and under her hairline.

The amino acids and nitrogenous bases of Alternia are subtly wrong. No matter how deeply she assimilates into this dread ship, with its lovely clean lines and knotty politics, she will always feel that their molecular state is the wrong one, that her familiar old tyrosines and isoleucines are the natural way of things. She memorized them, for form's sake, back when she was introducing herself to the ship, when her kidneys were failing and she was kept in a containment cell, yelling battleship coordinates in a language she didn't know. They had taken samples of her flesh and left books behind for her, perplexed and nervous.

Her keepers had then been yellow and rust-blooded pilots and engineers: nobody with gills knew she existed. The squadron found her, drifting in the wreck of a spaceship far, far from home, so she was their responsibility. Then the fifteenth squadron stopped suffering casualties (any casualties) and Rose Lalonde caught the attention of more powerful masters.

The trolls have psychics and mind-readers and powerful helmsmen, but they do not have clairvoyants. There was never any chance they were going to give her back, and besides, all the maps Rose could use to chart a way home count the miles starting from Earth, the human planetary (0,0). She doesn’t know where she is. She hasn’t for several lifetimes.

This is how the Condesce controls her: first, the empress is displeased, for the rebellion sits like a flea on the back of a warhorse. Then, Rose's nutrient drip is filled with robust Alternian molecules. Rose can eat nothing that wasn't synthesized fresh for her on pain of nausea, hair loss, and renal arrest. Finally, the renal arrest will kill her.

(This is the better option: Rose can eat sugar, and drink water. It will be a very slow starvation.)

(This is the worse option: the renal arrest will kill her, and the Condesce will bring her back.)

Someone walks into the restroom, and Rose looks at the needle-tipped mess of sterile tubing she has created and swears in Alternian.

"Helmseer," says Terezi Pyrope. Rose hears the rattle of a staff of office being lodged in the handle of the restroom door. "You are an idiot and you will get yourself killed at this rate."

Rose gingerly rises from her knees on the tile. Her jumpsuit is tacky in places, and her gloved hands leave red smudges on the door as she comes out of the stall. Rose's head feels muzzy while she tries to work out what timeline Terezi is serving, and she comes up blank. "I don't know you," Rose says.

Terezi huffs in exasperation, and pushes Rose towards the sink. "I know you looked me up. I hate explaining things, Seer. All the fairy tales said that you were smart. I've seen smart, and smart never got itself into the sort of situation that requires bathroom body modification." She turns on the sink and pulls a first aid kit out of her bag, then starts rummaging around for bandages.

"I suffer several unavoidable setbacks," Rose says.

The antibiotics that Terezi puts on her skin sting and tingle. "Yeah, sometimes smart gets itself hooked into a starship and used as an interstellar battery," she says. "Setbacks." Terezi's hands are cold, a contrast to the warm water that is soaking into Rose's gloves as she leans against the counter. Rose gets touched a lot; she has been biopsied and scanned and resurrected, she has slept with seadwellers and rustbloods, she has shaken hands and kissed cheeks and on one notable occasion, strangled someone. There is nothing remarkable about Terezi pulling her jumpsuit out of the way and wiping the blood clear with the pad of her thumb.

"What do you do with all this?" Terezi asks, when she is done. Rose shows her how to twist the needles off and pinch the lines closed before taping them carefully back over the bandaged places. The tiny pump that keeps the liquid moving complains loudly at the insult, flashing "air in the line" over and over, until Terezi grabs at it and smashes it against the counter.

Rose hooks the battered thing back to her belt. "It has a button for alarm silencing."

"Those things always override the silencing at the most inconvenient times," Terezi says.

They stare at each other, and Rose notices that Terezi is wearing the same thick-rimmed red-lensed glasses she was wearing when they first met in the hallway, and that the eyes behind them are scarlet and pupilless. Terezi is standing much too close.

"You have bright red blood," Terezi says. "That's interesting. None of the things they told me about you mentioned that."

Rose can't predict her and she likes it so much.

 

*

The next time Terezi appears, she intercepts Rose on her way to her private tactics meeting with the fleet admiral. "Helmseer!" she calls, brandishing a box of grubwine and a jam jar half-full of something shockingly blue. "Come party with us, we found a new rebel cell two solars cross-system. The empire is paying for drinks tonight."

The route from Rose's chambers to the situation wing does not duck through the loud, graffitied neophyte dorms, but Terezi looks like she just decided to amble down the hall on her way to get more cups. She's grinning and flushed, totally out of place among the sober offices of Alternia's military command. The hallway looks better with her in it: brighter, more feral, and sparkling where she's trailed glitter on the somber grey carpet. "I would," Rose says, without slowing, "but I have a previous engagement."

" _Rose,_ " Terezi says, and as Rose turns in surprise (Rose is touched by many hands but nobody _says her name_ ) Terezi whips her drink at Rose's head.

Rose ducks, spins, one neat twist, and Sees where Terezi's face while be, before backhanding her into the wall. "No," she says. "No I don't think so, and although I'd enjoy examining your motives before having you rendered down to your component parts, there isn't time."

There's a growing puddle of blue drink slowly sinking into the carpet; Rose can feel it through the soles of her shoes. Terezi peels herself away from the wall with a hiss. "They're going to beat you bloody in that meeting," she says. "They'll enjoy it. Don't go." Terezi's teeth have nicked her lip, and the blood sits on her lip like a glass bead for a moment before she licks it away.

Rose is wearing the thickest jumpsuit she has, reinforced with steel boning. She has replaced one of her many infusion pumps with a bag of saline and hooked it up properly, in case they come for her with knives. Rose is used to what happens when she falls out of the Condesce's favor, and her job is to see events before they happen.

(She stopped running timelines in her head for "> SCENARIO RESULT: happy ending" a long time ago.)

Her vision swims, as her body protests the thought of more punishment on top of the current deprivations. This is not tenable, in the long run. She cannot see the victory the Condesce wishes to see; brute force will drive the rebels to another planet, whereabouts even more unknown. Excise them and they will regrow like cancer, a stronger, more resistant strain, but leave them be and they will metastasize to the entire system.

Her body will hold out for another half a perigee, if they do not incur any more damage.

"I'll help," Terezi says. "Don't hit me again, and don't got to the meeting, and I'll be helpful. Even if I don't look like I am. The timeline where you don't hit me again is a fantastic one and you know it."

"You're manipulating me," Rose says, head clearing as she settles back into the satisfying game of outthinking an opponent. Something is terribly off about Terezi Pyrope; there is a familiar quality to her movements, like she anticipates Rose's actions and is moving to counter before she sets herself in motion.

Terezi grins so wide Rose thinks her face is going to split in two. "You and me, we can't be tricked," she says. "We can just be corralled into the decision of least resistance."

Rose pulls her respirator mask down so that she can grin back, and backs Terezi closer to the wall. Terezi's free hand rises to brush against her jumpsuit, gauging how close Rose is, marking the boundaries of her personal space. Rose presses in until Terezi's head hits the wall and her teeth click together with a wet snick. Terezi laughs when Rose kisses her, then threads her fingers into Rose's hair. She smells like wine. Rose pushes Terezi's head against the wall again, hard, and is rewarded by an intake of breath and the jerk of Terezi's hips against her thigh.

When she draws back and has settled her mask back in place, Terezi runs her hands once, possessively, up and down Rose's sides.

"Welcome to the rumor mill, Terezi Pyrope. You're half of the helmseer's hot new black dalliance. Do not throw things at me in public ever again."

 

*

The first problem is that Terezi Pyrope knows too much.

The second problem is that Rose is leaning over the sink in her personal nutrition block, dry-heaving.

The places where her IV lines have been torn out are healing. Rose can tell because they have begun to itch. The irritation in the crooks of her elbows is almost more distracting than the acrid taste of bile in the back of her mouth or the careful dance of breathing around retches, if only because it is a novel unpleasant sensation.

Rose has sent a courier to collect Terezi, in response to her first problem; she would like very much to be presentable. She's nervous, which is ridiculous. She has been facing down the doll-eyed stares of seadwellers since before Terezi was a murky swirl of slurry. She has felt the warmth of Terezi's tongue in her mouth. Rose Lalonde is invincible, in her element, but she is nervous because she has a hunch, and she dislikes being uncertain.

When Terezi arrives she is dressed in a white tank-top with low-slung black jeans. The red sunglasses are still there, and she's thrown a loud sequined jacket over the whole ensemble.

"Wine?" Rose offers, as Terezi strides through the doorway and sniffs at the room. The air is different here, so Rose can take off her mask; Rose is not surprised at Terezi's pause.

"No, thank you." Terezi says.

Rose picks her way around the atmosphere conditioner's power cords to settle on her couch, own glass of wine in hand. "Sit, then," she says, and Terezi charts her own course, slowly, through the room, running her fingers over the sides of Rose's life support machinery as she passes them. "I thought we could play Go," Rose says. "A game of strategy."

"A game of foresight," Terezi says, and she stirs the dishes of white and black stones with a claw.

If Rose had been gunning for subtlety, all is lost now, but she just smiles, and gestures for Terezi to choose a color. When Terezi leans forward to examine the board more closely Rose can see down her thin tank-top. She isn't wearing a bra.

"The poppyseed stones," Terezi declares. "You may take the ground ginger."

Precognition means winning games of chance as easily as breathing, and winning games of strategy a casual certainty. Rose could have chosen a coin toss, or gin rummy, or charades, but she appreciates the warlike implications of Go.

Terezi opens weakly; Rose counters with a weak response, happy to throw the first game. It ends in a beginner's shambles. They clear the board in silence.

The second game begins when Terezi shrugs her jacket off.

Terezi wins.

"What do I get?" Terezi asks, as she picks the last black stone off of the cleared board. She has come around the low coffee table to sit on the same couch as Rose, and is leaning over Rose's bent knees to get to the bowl of black pieces. "For beating the unbeatable?"

Rose rests her fingers against Terezi's hairline at the back of her neck, and whispers into her ear, "You know exactly what you get."

 

*

"So," Terezi says, standing bare-chested in front of her, utterly lacking in self-consciousness, "that's what fucking the all-knowing heart of the imperial strategy board is like." She sounds a little bored.

Rose coughs politely and ignores the insult.

"Am I ruining your afterglow?" Terezi asks.

"Yes," says Rose, and pointedly looks away from the exposed skin on Terezi's throat. It is a beautiful dusky teal, flushed from arousal and a brief flirtation with sexy strangling and the fact that Rose's chambers have entirely the wrong gaseous composition for troll aerating sacs, which by now should have Terezi swaying on her feet. She's not, and it's irritating.

Instead Terezi comes closer and drapes her razor-ribbed frame all over Rose's chest, where she can lick at the little callouses on Rose's cheeks where the respirator rubs. "You are spectacularly disinterested in having any kind of afterglow!" she crows into Rose’s ear.

She's also charming, which is terrible.

"We'll do this again sometime," Terezi says.

They are doing this backwards.

"You don't know that," Rose says, warning.

"Enough of the game. We are seers and it is unbecoming," Terezi says, not impressed. "This exchange was not surprising to either of us; surprises are for other people."

Rose could tell the Condesce about Terezi. She could wait, patient, until Terezi won an unwinnable case, and then she could tie her up in the little strings of the empire and Terezi would never leave her and the Condesce would be pleased with her for at least a century. It's an ugly thought, but Rose's world is not a pretty one, and her nails have gone brittle, chipping away at the tips of fingers that tremor continuously.

Instead Rose sighs and places a hand across her forehead. "I always wish that I didn't know what my Twelfth Perigree's Eve presents would be. The world is just so dull when you know it will be socks, more socks, a sweater, and the Condesce's generous gift of youth for the next several hundred sweeps. There is no joy in the entire world."

"Indeed there is a cosmological lack of joy. Justice too, dreadfully lacking!" She pauses to arrange her legs less artfully across Rose's couch, and hums in satisfaction when she settles a knee to jab into the meaty part of Rose's thigh. "Are you planning to kill me, Seer?" Terezi wants to know.

Rose smiles and wraps one hand gently around her throat, where she can feel the steady thrumming rush of blood through alien veins. Terezi taps at Rose's temples (her claws skipping daintily so, so close to the eyes) in time with the thud of Rose's heart. "Of course not," Rose says.

"Good."

Terezi kisses her hard enough that their teeth click together, and wobbles shirtless into the outer corridor.

 

*

Days on the imperial strategy ship begin for Rose with the sudden appearance of floodlights, illuminating every corner of her room. The scientists in charge of keeping her healthy learned that she could not see well in the dark, and overcompensated.

Rose likes it.

Terezi does not flinch at the bright lights, even when Rose draws her out of the dim neophyte dorms and into the bright without warning. Rose's apartments are large and well-appointed, but they are sterile, and there are many alarm lights and switches that she is not allowed to touch. It is not a helmsblock, with a column of flesh cradled in machinery, but it is something kin to it.

They have a routine, now. Rose summons Terezi by courier early in pre-dawn, or late after Terezi is finished in the court block participating in mock trial, or in the middle of a meal when she knows Terezi will grudgingly sacrifice a spare half an hour. Terezi brings with her sugar and water, neatly counted into sachets of 500 calories each. Rose's gums are bleeding for want of vitamins, but she wipes her teeth clean before smiling at Terezi.

They sit together until the thin air burrows into Terezi's head. They play Go, and piece together political news of the rebellion that Rose may feed to her superiors, and try to see a satisfying future for the empress. They see the future in slightly different ways, complimentary, like yellow-gold and tyrian. Rose can feel likelihoods, percentages, and the bright flash of explosions in the dark, little increases in entropy. Terezi sees the choices of people and unknots their motivations. It makes her a brilliant lawyer, even one in training, and Terezi is not above bringing with her the spoils of her success. She brings little delicacies from political banquets she has been invited to, and a fresh tailored jacket that shows off her neat wrists and flatters her sharp-lined shoulder blades.

Rose discards the treats and peels Terezi out of her jacket.

In the bright lights of her chambers (the brightness does not bother Terezi or Rose because it keeps the shadows neatly defined; defined things are more easily controlled), Rose can see all the vulnerable pieces of Terezi Pyrope.

There are not very many.

There is her devotion to justice, and the belief that a wrongdoer should not go free. (There are many wrongdoers in the Empire.) This bothers Rose, because there is something underneath it she cannot see, so she catalogues it as a weakness in Terezi even though she does not know why.

There is the knee that will fall prey to an assassin's blade or to a nasty fall down the stairs, depending on the choices of several key players, which she favors already like she is grateful to have it still bend freely.

And there is how many good, loyal lawyers the empire already has, compared to how few reliable seers.

(The empire has one reliable seer, precisely.)

 

*

Rose is arguing a familiar argument with Terezi, on the inescapability of fate and the illusion of free will. All reactions on a fundamental level come from simple physical rules, Rose says. All reactions are caused by some preceding reaction. There is no mystical manipulation of atoms by the will. Terezi laughs and talks about volition.

Their walk home from the Rose's latest briefing meeting is triumphant. The rebels are magically falling back, and while Rose cannot see how to crush them, any action the empire takes for the next two perigees will maintain their retreat. Rose has suggested something showy and heroic, with casualties. It will end how the Condesce wants it, and it will seem to fall on the side of the empire by a hairs breadth. The grand show of conquer will trek on, and Rose and Terezi will have more time.

Rose can see that they will put her back on human nutrients soon. She can stop worrying about keeping her teeth. Terezi, dressed in a comfortable t-shirt with an obnoxious Sunslammer Down graphic splashed across the front, roused from sleep by Rose at the end of her meeting, leans on her arm and gestures to better illustrate her point. “If you have the brain of a leech,” she says, “and you cut it from the leech and give it a very simple stimuli, you should have, in the absence of will, a predictable system. Control what goes in, measure what goes out.”

There is a note addressed in tyrian calligraphy pinned neatly to Rose's door.

Terezi is still making her point about free will. “And the leech brain must decide; crawl or swim? It should be predictable! There is no body to complicate things, and it is a very tiny brain.“

Confidential, the note says on the outside.

“But it is not predictable. The leech does what it damn well pleases.”

This is a very public way to recieve a missive. Terezi notices it, and stops.

On the inside it is on official letterhead, with gold leaf heavily embossing the seal of the empress, and Rose begins to be afraid. "To the Helmseer of the Ninth Strategic Hiveship of the Fleet of the Empire: This letter is to inform you of the presence of rebel intelligence being siphoned from the Ninth Hiveship. The Empress awaits your advice and direction."

It is signed and dusted with the un-subtle sheen of glitter. Rose shudders at the glaring omission: it is Rose's job to know these things. What use is she if she is not reliable? When Rose passes the note to Terezi and pulls down her respirator to take a breath and reevaluate her options, the air burns all the way down.

Rose coughs and buckles, pushing her mask back on with shaking hands. Her rack of spare air tanks sits emptily, a perfect unbroken grid. It unbalances the room. She checks the meter on her mobile tank: forty minutes. Terezi has read the note and is edging towards the doorway, her back to the exit. She looks ready to bolt.

Rose does not want to die. It will hurt, and she will lose pieces of herself in coming back. She will lose the piece of herself that learned how to play Go, she thinks, and part of herself that cares about Terezi Pyrope.

It's too much, and her body betrays her one final time and she starts to cry. Terezi looks like someone took all the air out of the room for her, despite the fact that for the first time she is breathing freely in Rose's apartments. "Don't," she says, and the note is crumpled in her hands, dusting her grey fingers with pink glitter. "You don't do this. Why won't you fucking make this stop? Tell the Condesce about me. Let her have me, betray me, why are you being so _weak_? You were supposed to be _cold._ "

It's a futile gesture, to bare her teeth through her tears and behind her mask, but Rose does it anyway. "Because it would be giving up!" she yells. She's shaking and burning, and her head is spinning. One at a time, things slot into place, all the little pieces of the future she couldn't see.

It feels like the gravity dropped out of the ship. "It's you."

Terezi stands her ground. "Yes. You were supposed to rat me out to the empress for being a seer that first night, when you searched my name, while my cover was still sound. You did not cooperate!"

"You're working for the insurgence."

"Yes."

The room in front of Rose's eyes swims, and she wipes furiously at her eyes, breathing in hard through her running nose with a noise like tearing paper. She is going to fall into a million pieces. She is going to take this ship apart with her. She looks at Terezi and the words fall out of her mouth: "I have to watch you die."

Terezi doesn't move. Rose has mapped all of Terezi's skin with her mouth; she knows the taste of her teeth. (It's too much.) Terezi doesn't even flinch, and Rose wants to strike out at something, anything.

"Run," Rose says, "Run, Terezi. Run because I am going to find you and you won't enjoy it." Her voice rises, cracks: she screams, " _just go!_ "

Terezi wavers, leans towards the door, and changes her mind. She sets her face in a passionless mask and takes one step, two, towards Rose, placing her feet gingerly and deliberately like she is walking through heavy snow in thin shoes. "There's nowhere to run," Terezi says. "I wagered on your famous indifference and I lost. It's almost over."

She comes close enough that Rose can see the red of her eyes through her sunglasses, and the subtle texture of scar tissue over her corneas. "Helmseer," Terezi says, and she's so close.

Rose stamps on Terezi's instep, hard. As Terezi's torso caves inward Rose's hands find Terezi's shoulders, grip hard, and drive Terezi's face downwards into her knee. Terezi's nose crunches, and there's wetness on Rose's jumpsuit which she can feel through the heavy neoprene.

Terezi goes down, curled like a comma with her arms held defensively over her face. She doesn't try to get up again, which Rose thinks is a piece of mercy for herself as well, because it hurts, deep down where she does not want to think about, to kick Terezi Pyrope.

Rose wonders how certain Terezi was that Rose would hurt her when she stepped away from the door.

Quite certain, Rose suspects.

Rose stands over Terezi, cheeks damp and the minutes ticking past, and she looks into the future. The empress has a computer system she likes to hook Rose up to, one which makes her predictions much more accurate by calculating the probabilities of many non-discreet events at once, the sort of precognition that is useful for the empire. Adding another seer will give the empire twice the processing power; a parallel process they've been dreaming of. Except now the only other seer in the fleet was a leak, siphoning intelligence off to the rebel forces.

With Terezi shuddering on the ground at her feet, Rose takes stock of the future the old way, no computer, just the flickering ghost-images of what may be, like double-exposed film.

The communications nodule is incorporated into her suit, and voice-activated. When she makes the call, it will take seventeen minutes for a response to be organized.

(Rose loves the time between when a decision is made and an effect is registered. All the alternatives fall away and the future is simple, for seventeen minutes.)

She crouches down and runs her fingers gently through Terezi's hair while she waits for the team to arrive.

 

*

The hanging of the rebel spy is public. In a grand auditorium, where two nights past there was an orchestra playing at the pleasure of the Condesce (she did not attend, but a video feed was sent to her computer). Rose is in the audience, back straight to support her portable atmosphere supply, filled with six hours of good air.

It's not done with a rope, not anymore. A necklace of electrodes is settled gently around the condemned troll's neck, and a wire is inserted into the spinal cord. Then the ship's helmsman hijacks the system and tells the heart to stop.

It's very clean. The dead spy hits the ground and there is a smattering of polite applause.

Beside Rose, Terezi straightens the bandages around the new jacks in the back of her skull. She is festooned with fewer IV lines, but her jumpsuit is cut in a silhouette identical to Rose's. They make a lovely pair. They will make a lovely pair for the next thousand years. The empire does not release its tools before it has wrung all the use out of them.

The Condesce is very pleased to have a second seer; pleased enough to make a large show of imprisoning the nutritionist in charge of Rose's supply and to ask no questions when Rose and Terezi agree on the identity of the infiltrator.

Rose is very gentle with the newly healing places on Terezi's scalp.

Terezi sends no message to the well-hidden communications base two solar systems over (they would know if she was dead, which is enough) and settles in to wait for the empire to fall.

 

*

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Linden, thank for the lovely prompts! This ended up being a mash-up of "So what if Rose was a sort of Helmsman?" and "Rose/Terezi: basically: sexy, sexy prescience. Go." I hope you do not mind that I could not choose between them, so took the two and bashed them against each other until they generated enough plot for a story.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed it!


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